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The blog has languished a bit for the last few days – particularly over the weekend. The Olympics have dominated my weekend, especially my own sport of rowing. Rowing delivered two golds, two silvers and two bronzes over the weekend.

Yet again the women failed to come through with rowing gold but the men’s coxless four and lightweight double came home. I was particularly pleased for Mark Hunter in the lightweight double. Mark Hunter is a relative veteran at 30, I remember seeing him win the junior quads event in 1995 at Henley. Since then he has worked solidly to get where he is now, always supported by his Dad who is as familiar a face on the rowing scene as his son.

Another largely untold story of the rowing team is Jurgen Grobler. He is the ex-East German coach of GB men’s heavyweight rowing who oversaw Redgrave and Pinsent and the subsequent coxless fours. Grobler has coached a gold medal winning crew at every Olympics since Munich in 1972. That’s 10 Olympics in a row.

Today the Telegraph points out that John Major is the father of the 17 medals picked up by Britain over the weekend. He started the Lottery and it is the Lottery funded machines of British Rowing, Sailing and Cycling that have delivered the goods. I am proud of my sport but I am open-mouthed in admiration of Britain’s cycling machine.

In Atlanta in 1996, Britain only managed to win one gold medal with rowers Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent in the pair. Since then the influence of the Lottery has been clear.

I have seen a kingfisher three times in my life. The third time was this morning on the Thames at Brentford Lock. I hit the water at 7am and got up to Brentford at about 8am. You rarely see these birds, as they are so shy. The bird just whizzed by like a bullet, brilliant blue on top and rusty red underneath. Unmistakeable. Lovely.

Yesterday the Evening Standard was reporting that the Mayor was keen on a Croydon scheme to stop under 21s buying drinks at off-licences.

Today they are reporting that a number of other councils are up for it too, including Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham and our own Ealing.

Council leader Jason Stacey said: “It is a great idea and we hope as many off-licences as possible sign up to the scheme. I hope it will reduce binge drinking among teenagers.”

I need to declare an interest as a licencee myself but this really is a good idea. Having young people drinking lots of cheap booze at home or in the park isn’t good for anyone. Licensed premises are typically managed and there is a certain discipline enforced by the landlord, even in the worst pub chain managed premises – compared to ten youths clustered around a park bench or on a street corner.

A 21 age limit in off-licences also makes booze way more inaccessible to under 18s.

I’m away for the weekend rowing.

Basically it is a boys’ weekend with a 54 mile row to Henley from Hammersmith thrown in to keep it interesting.

Back Tuesday. No doubt tired and sunburnt.

With the London elections this blog was very busy at the start of the month. The Google analytics chart below, click to enlarge, shows how many unique visitors I got throughout May. Google counts people only once during the period for this particular chart.

This chart says that in May 5,267 different people made a total of 7,132 visits and looked at 11,311 pages. That’s 230 visits per day.

These posters are all over Basel. They refer to a referendum on June 1st and are the work of the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) or Swiss People’s Party. They are the people responsible for the notorious black sheep poster campaign last Autumn, see here. In case the imagery is unclear the coloured hands are reaching for Swiss passports. Dog whistling is clearly not the preserve of our own prime minister.

The June 1st referendum seeks to reinstate a process that allowed local people to decide on the naturalization of a foreign citizen through a municipal vote.

This process was banned in 2003 by the Swiss Federal Court, which alleged that many citizenship applicants, particularly those of Balkan origin, were rejected unfairly by some communities. The SVP is in favour. More information here.

Although the SVP are the largest party in the Swiss National Council with 62 out of 200 seats they are out of step thankfully with the majority of Swiss opinion on this one which is 56% against the referendum compared to 33% for and 11% not sure.

Last year the black sheep campaign was widely covered by the UK press but the election result was not. The SVP increased their share of National Council seats from 55 to 62. Not a good advert for Swizerland.

A while back I whinged about the UK passport service. Today, thanks to my daughter, I experienced the American version. It seems that rubbish passport services are not a uniquely British phenomenon. Months ago my American wife made an “appointment” for 2.15pm for us to go to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square to sort out a US passport for our new daughter. She already has a British one delivered relatively painlessly through the mail, although with the drawback that you have to send of your documents off for some weeks.

The so-called appointment turned out to be three hours of queuing and waiting around in their Soviet-style waiting room. Finished in 1960 the embassy really does have that 1950s state architecture look. We arrived half an hour early and queued to get through security and then we queued to get a number so that we could wait around. Only it transpired that our photo was a British passport photo and therefore too small for an American passport application. They need a 2″ x 2″ photo. The lady did helpfully point out that there was a handy chemist shop in North Audley Street that would sort things out. So, whilst my wife queued to pay $150, I ran out to the chemists. This was the best part of the experience.

Two very friendly and polite South Asian guys got out a baby chair and white cloth to make a makeshift photo booth. They had an expensive looking digital camera and conferred over a couple of shots before they pronounced themselves happy. For the excellent price of £7.50 I got a quick, efficient and friendly service. These guys should be running the embassy.

Back at the embassy, the queues had all melted away. It seems they don’t really run an appointment system it is either AM or PM. Everyone comes in a rush at the start of the session and that is the batch of work for the morning or afternoon. It boggles my mind that they make whole families go through this rigmarole. The waiting room was full of unhappy families, some with crying toddlers, others with tiny babies who had obviously been conned by the talk of an appointment. You wouldn’t choose to make a newborn baby wait around for 3 hours. For us it was two wasted half days out of work plus a £100 bill (as well as everything else you need to pay £16 to use their courier service). The only blessing was that the baby didn’t melt down on us.

This afternoon I went to Argyle Square to take part in the Free Tibet Rally. My photo isn’t very good and fails to convey that the small square was very full. I reckon that something in the order of 1,000 people were there and I was disappointed not to see it covered on BBC News 24 since I have got home. I did briefly turn over to Sky News to see them interviewing Joanna Lumley at the entrance to the garden.

The high point for me was an excellent speech by Labour Vauxhall MP, Kate Hoey, who excoriated Gordon Brown for getting involved in the torch relay and asked how dare the Chinese ambassador parade through London with the torch.

After yesterday’s news pictures of Greek security people duffing up Tibet protestors I know what I will be doing on Sunday 6th April from 2.15pm – supporting the idea of freedom for Tibet and hoping to help in a tiny way to embarrass the preposterous Olympic movement and its fatuous torch tour to totalitarian China.

Details below (click to enlarge).